DECOR : In With the Old: Traditional Looks Have New Appeal

Nicole Yorkin, a screenwriter and mother in her 30s, admits that she never imagined herself ever liking an old English Tudor house. But since she and her husband, lawyer Tim Shaheen, bought a 1937 Tudor Revival a few years ago, their taste has taken a turn.

The couple dumped the sleek leather couch, modern dining room set and turquoise fireplace surround from their first house and set about replacing them with overstuffed chairs and couches covered in stripes, paisleys and velvets strewn with old needlepoint pillows and an enchanting mix of Anglo-Indian, Victorian, Moroccan and Gothic antiques.

“I’m definitely a convert from contemporary furnishings,” Yorkin says. “Now I have the kind of house your parents might be comfortable in. It’s peaceful and comfortable, and there’s a warmth to it that our other house didn’t have. It’s a house you can really live in.”

They are not the only people making a sharp swerve from the decorating fads--Santa Fe adobe goes condo, flea market-itis, cutting-edge contemporary--that pervade magazines and books and furniture and gift stores.

Traditional interior design is back, although it’s back with a twist on Grandma’s variety. And it’s back where you’d least expect it--in the homes of people in their 30s and 40s, people who didn’t necessarily grow up with a fondness for it.

For a multimillion-dollar redo of the Jack Warner estate, David Geffen has turned to Rose Tarlow, famous for her forays into 17th-Century styles. Barbra Streisand sold off her prized early 20th-Century Art Nouveau and Art Deco furnishings to concentrate on Early American.

At Getty House, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan’s official residence in Hancock Park, plans are underway to decorate (with an October completion date) entirely in keeping with the English Tudor exterior. Many of the fabrics are new, including sisal rugs and suede chair coverings, but the look will be classic English traditional, down to the Tudor-style desk in Riordan’s office and an old-fashioned tank toilet in the bathroom.

“The feeling was that this is easier to live with, and it will last. We didn’t want it to be too trendy,” says Adele Yellin, who is overseeing more than a dozen decorators who volunteered to overhaul the estate.

Although traditional implies furniture from a previous era--typically French and English furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries--the idea today isn’t to put it together like a display at the Getty Museum. These days, the idea is to collect good-quality Things With Age. While that means antiques and hand-me-downs, depending on your decorating persuasion, it can also mean antique reproductions, as well as a smattering of modern classics such as an Eames chair or two. In any case, the furniture is definitely not true to one period, and the rooms are set off with colors and textiles that display more about the owner’s personality than anything historically correct.

Penny Bianchi, a Pasadena interior designer in the traditional mode whose business is booked far in advance, says it’s easier to describe her work by what it isn’t--trendy or throwaway--than what it is. “Trendy is not what you want in your furniture. Your furniture should stay with you for generations.”

Still, Bianchi and others admit that traditional can get very boring, staid and blah.

“What I do to avoid that is (to) use lots of color and a mixture of very fine things and very simple things,” she says. She points out a simple basket on a Louis XV desk and a huge outdoor terra-cotta pot next to an 18th-Century sphinx in her living room, which has shocking pink and moss-green upholstery and curtains of pale yellow silk taffeta with ancient red velvet valances. One client, Shelly Gambardella, says she was “scared to death” when Bianchi painted her living room dark celadon green, because she had grown up with neutral walls.

Bianchi almost always uses contemporary upholstered furniture because of its comfort value (“I don’t like to sit in little spindly sofas”), and she doesn’t mind using some 1940s pieces. “Something happened to taste after the second World War. I don’t know what it was, but it was bad,” she says. A certain degree of recycling is also involved in the traditional look, in which hand-me-downs are dusted off and perhaps given a coat of lacquer. Rarely is anything thrown away.

Suzanne Rheinstein, a decorator who owns the Hollyhock antique and gift store on Larchmont Boulevard in Hancock Park, bought an 80-year-old neighbor’s sofa during a furniture sale, slipcovered it and put it in her sun room at home. Seven years ago, she reproduced “Mrs. Walker’s sofa” and sells it in her store today.

“Some things should be really good, some merely pleasant and some should show the personality of the people who live there,” Rheinstein says. She filled a 1930s Spanish Colonial home owned by Academy Award-winning visual-effects specialist Ed Jones with a good number of Regency, 19th-Century French and Gothic pieces. But she also put to work everything else he owned, including a brand new cowboy-style chair, several 17th-Century Japanese tansu chests, a new wrought-iron coffee table and his wide contemporary couch, which she reupholstered in yellow linen velvet.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” says Julia Winston, a lecturer and former curator of exhibitions at the Decorative Arts Center in San Juan Capistrano. “It’s not just all wood, wood, wood and pastels from the last classical department store revival. Fifty or 60 years ago, there was a timidity in traditional homes. Lampshades were timid; arrangements were timid, colors were timid. People were so afraid of having bad taste that it was watered down. Traditional has come back, but it isn’t proper.”

“I certainly don’t see myself as a strict traditionalist if one were to define it as Chippendale and Queen Anne and proper draperies and understated colors,” says Madeline Stuart, a 35-year-old interior designer whose clients are virtually all in the entertainment business, including Yorkin and Shaheen, Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group Chairman Mark Canton and his wife, “Forrest Gump” producer Wendy Finerman, Columbia Pictures President Lisa Henson, screenwriter Gary Ross, Creative Artists Agency agent Jay Moloney and “Seinfeld’s” Jason Alexander.

Yet Stuart, who says she is “edifying” people’s sensibilities to the value of pieces with long-lasting value and substance, finds that her clients in the entertainment business are particularly willing students.

“My credo is that when you buy a piece of 19th-Century furniture or even a piece from the 1930s, it’s real. And that’s why so many of my clients buy antiques rather than something new,” says Stuart. “It’s nice to go home to a piece of 19th-Century furniture. It has stability in a town that has no stability. Hollywood is where all is artifice and there is little that is real.”

Daena Title, wife of Alexander, says that her and her husband’s move to antiques--English, Gothic Revival, Aesthetic Movement, among other eras--and vibrant, Bloomsbury colors and textiles, is hardly “musty, dusty, old, seen-it-before” or inherited. Indeed, she grew up with white walls and Bauhaus furniture. Now, she says, “I can’t live in all that sheeny, shiny stuff. I find this inviting and comfortable. I liken it to Matisse, who said his art should be like a big comfortable arm chair.”

Elle Decor Editor in Chief Marian McEvoy agrees that an antique revival makes perfect sense. “People are saying, ‘No more plastic--give me some oak.’ Nobody wants cookie-cutter houses. Antiques are sexier than contemporary furniture, and they also have great stories to tell. But if you do any period from A to Z, that’s over. It’s also wonderfully grown-up as long as you reupholster in a fresh way, not with fabric that’s too fancy, but a beautiful canvas awning stripe or mango and jade cottons.”

Even interior designers who specialized in contemporary interiors five to 10 years ago are barely getting requests for that look anymore. “The only time I do contemporary now is a beach house or a high-rise condo. Ninety percent of what I do is traditional,” says Stephen Tomar of Tomar-Lampert, whose clients include John McEnroe, Johnny Carson and Jon Peters. “Even Vendela wants everything to look like it’s the English countryside,” Tomar says.

“Everyone wants comfort and a traditional look,” he says. “You can’t imagine how many 17th- or 18th-Century English partners desks we’ve put lap tops in.”

Likewise, Kerry Joyce worked almost exclusively with “extremely modern” until six years ago, when clients started demanding traditional.

“I had to grow into my traditional side,” admits Joyce, who is redesigning the lobby of the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood. Even though many of his clients don’t own a stick of furniture when they begin, when he’s finished the house “feels like family. It gives you a sense of history, a feeling that it’s always been there. It’s very hard to create a sense of home with modern.”

For the uninitiated, the process of decorating a traditional house is as important as the final product. Because gathering good antiques, good silver, good crystal, good fabrics and good whatever-it-is-you-want is the idea, the search can take years, partly because it all gets rather expensive. Every homeowner interviewed for this article reported that his or her house was not finished.

Shelly Gambardella and her doctor husband, Ralph, have been clients of Bianchi for about 10 years. Every two years or so, they call Bianchi to complete another room in their Pasadena Cotswold cottage. “Shelly told her husband, ‘I want to do it once and do it right.’ We still have the library and the guest room to do,” Bianchi says.

Bianchi client Kim Wardlaw, a partner at O’Melvany & Meyers, predicts her house will be done in two years (decorating began last year). Husband Bill, a merchant banker, thinks 10 is more realistic. “It’s a question of finding the right pieces, the time and the money. We’re looking for a piece for the living room, maybe an antique English chest. We haven’t found it, so we haven’t had to face the dilemma of, can we afford it,” Kim Wardlaw says.

Until recently, the Wardlaws were strictly, and happily, into the Santa Fe look. “If you asked me last year, I’d have said Santa Fe or modern was my style,” Kim Wardlaw says. “But we were dead wrong with what we were comfortable with. The color combinations, the drapes, the couches, the dark woods, the age of the furniture--it seems like it’s always been there and has always been part of us.”